These days all the retailers require a navigational Table of Contents in your ebook, so if you’re uploading a new book, updating an edited version of your previously published book, adding new titles and links to your list, or adding new reviews, you’ll need to bite this particular bullet.

I must tell you, I resisted the new functionality at first. I argued against it. “Readers can already bookmark their ebooks in their ereaders, why should I add another layer of complexity?” And “This is fiction, not a textbook in which the reader may want to skip around to various chapters.”

Forget about arguing with Apple. “We require it, and that’s that,” they said. So does everyone else.

Smashwords offers a free video you can download that walks you through how to do it. I didn’t download it. After my laptop got seriously hacked last summer, I download as little as possible from the Internet.

And I don’t know about you, but my eyes glaze over reading Help on Microsoft Word. Plus, I found a major instance in which the Help didn’t provide the latest or the easiest information. So I figured out how to do this functionality myself.

Once I’d worked out the kinks, I really love the Navigational Table of Contents. It turns out to be a helpful tool in a reader’s ebook and makes your presentation more professional. It’s not difficult, just a bit time-consuming

First things first.

After your front matter page (book title, author, the usual disclaimer language, date of publication), insert a page and set up your Table of Contents. I think centering this looks best.

Type “Table of Contents,” then the headings, typically “Praise for Books by You,” “Contents of Your Book,” “About You the Author,” and “Books by You,” and any other special features your book may contain that you’d like a reader to jump to, such as a “Dedication,” “A Introductory Poem or Quotation,” or a “List of Sources.”

Shaken has a List of Sources, for example, because I did a lot research about earthquakes for that short novel (expanded from a novelette, “Deus Ex Machina, published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine). Same for The Sixty-third Anniversary of Hysteria, in this case research about women Surrealist artists in Mexico, 1941.

But keep your TOC simple, with a bare bones of headings. You don’t want to overwhelm the reader on the second page of the ebook! Tip: If your ebook is divided into a few Parts, I think the Part titles work well in the Table of Contents. The Garden of Abracadabra is divided into three titled Parts, with chapters labeled only with numbers. Tesla, A Worthy of His Time: A Screenplay has five titled Acts.

That’s a small enough number of headings in addition to the basics not to overwhelm. Be sure to type the exact title of the Part, spelled correctly.

Tip: What if your book has only chapters with numbers and not titles? I’ve seen some TOCs in which the author has dutifully listed and centered the chapter numbers and linked to each. You’re under no obligation to list each and every numbered chapter, especially if the chapters have no chapter titles. It looks silly and clutters up the beginning of your ebook. The retailers don’t require it.

What to do? Set up your TOC as suggested above, including a heading, “Title of Your Book.” Then insert “Title of Your Book” on the first page of text above the first chapter, Bookmark and Hyperlink it as set forth below, and you’re good to go.

Tip: What if your book has numerous parts and chapters with titles?

Do not put them in your TOC.

Instead, link “Contents of Your Book” in your TOC to your Contents page with Part numbers and titles, and Chapter number and titles. Then, on the Contents page, you may Bookmark and Hyperlink each part or each part and chapter, if you wish.

Summer of Love has seven parts and twenty-one chapters. The Gilded Age has numerous parts and twenty chapters. I Bookmarked and Hyperlinked everything on a Contents page..

This is for those of you who work with MS Word and have a .doc file for your ebook. This is the Gold Standard, uploadable on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords, which ships to Apple, Kobo, and Sony.

[If you’re working on an Apple device, I can’t help you.]

Step One: Bookmarking 1: Do this first. Select Table of Contents on your TOC page. On the top toolbar, click Insert. You will see the menu for various Inserts. In the middle of the toolbar, find Hyperlink and Bookmark.

Click on Bookmark. You will see a menu cuing you to name the Bookmark and an Add, Delete, Cancel list to the right.

Always start the Bookmark with a capital letter. No punctuation, no spaces, but you can capitalize letters within so you can easily identify the Bookmark when you go to Hyperlink to it.

Example: The first chapter in Summer of Love is “She’s Leaving Home”. The Bookmark for the chapter is “ShesLeavingHome”.

The menu will then cue you to Add.

Since we’re still on the Table of Contents heading on the TOC page, type in TOC and Add it. The Bookmark must always be TOC.

When I uploaded my first updated ebook on Amazon, I got a Quality Notification stating that the GoTo function in the ebook wasn’t functioning. The Quality Team sent me a link to hellishly complicated MS Word instructions on an automated Table of Contents functionality. The Instructions, when I printed them out, were 6 pages long!

In fact, Hyperlink-Bookmark is simplicity itself, and I sent them an email to that effect. Some kind soul replied that all I needed to do was Bookmark the Table of Contents as TOC.

I really doubt the automated Table of Contents works across the many platforms you need to upload your ebook to. Don’t go there.

Step Two: Bookmarking 2: Next, you want to move on through your ebook and find each heading you want to Bookmark. That would be “Praise for Books by You,” “Contents of Your Book,” “About You the Author,” “Books by You,” and any special features your ebook offers, Part titles and Chapter titles. You want to do this first to make sure you match the Bookmark to the heading.

Select the text, Click Insert, Go to Bookmark, type in the Bookmark name, and click Add.

Tip: If, on the Bookmark menu, you see a little box to the left checked “Hidden bookmarks,” it means MS Word, in its mysterious way, has generated a line of code that will interfere with your legitimate Bookmarks. (Why oh why does Word do that?) Click a couple of times on “Hidden bookmarks,” not the checkbox, and you will see in your list of Bookmarks, one or more bookmarks beginning with _. Delete those bad boys! Delete them all!

Step Three: Hyperlinking: This is the fun part.

Go back to your Table of Contents page. Select a heading under Table of Contents and click on Hyperlink. You will get the Hyperlink menu. Click on Place in this Document to the left of the menu and–lo!–your list of Bookmarks will appear.

In the “Text to Display” box at the top, the selected heading should appear, but if it doesn’t, carefully type it in. Then find the Bookmark name you’ve given for the place in your book, click on it, add it, and save your file. You’re done!

Almost done.

Tip: Be sure to test each Hyperlink. Select the text, left click on it or click plus Ctrl, and MS Word should zoom you to the right spot.

Another tip: I have three different Books by Lisa Mason for each of the main retailers with different links and specialized text. I paste each in depending on the version of the ebook. When I do that, though, the Books by Lisa Mason Bookmark gets nullified and I have to reBookmark and reHyperlink it to make it work.

So there you have it, my friends. Creating a navigational Table of Contents in your ebook takes a little extra time—which none of us has!—but you’ve got to do it. I hope my trials and errors will help make the task a little easier for you.

The acclaimed fantasy author, Charles de Lint, writes a column, “Books To Look For.” In the May-June Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, he reviews Black Wolf by Steph Shangraw, published by Prysmeat Books. Yes, that’s an independent publisher.

De Lint writes: “I’m fascinated with the proliferation of independently published books. But before I get into the whys and wherefores, let me first say that I don’t dislike offerings from what’s coming to be referred to as legacy publishing (i.e., books printed and distributed by the big publishing houses). I just think there’s room for everybody. The more voices writing their own stories there are, the more choices there are for readers. And a lot of voices from a lot of different sources are a good thing, especially since I’m not all that sure legacy publishers will be around that much longer.

“Or at least not in their current state. Ebooks haven’t completely overtaken paper books yet, but the writing seems to be on the wall. It’ll be especially interesting to see what happens as the coming generations of readers—more accustomed to reading everything on a screen, from texts to websites to magazines and books—become the main consumers.

“Which doesn’t mean I think paper books will disappear. I see them becoming more like physical pieces of art, lovingly designed and published by small presses that will celebrate the physical aspect of a book as well as what lies inside its pages. But the days seem to be numbered for the cheap mass market paperback—the kinds of books that most people read once, then dispose of. Ebooks fit that bill as well, but the delete button on your reader is a lot easier to utilize than having to box up a bunch of physical books and then haul them down to your local thrift shop.

“All of which certainly helps indie publishers, many of whom are of that generation cited above: they’ve matured with technology as a normal part of their lives. There’s a growing movement among these young authors—savvy with technology in a way that their elders aren’t—to do it all on one’s own.. . . .

“The authors who decide to go the indie route do so for a number of reasons other than the fact that a legacy publisher isn’t interested in their work. . . . Sometimes the subject matter is simply too edgy—too violent, perhaps, or dealing with sexual/political/social elements that don’t fit the philosophy or style of the legacy publisher.

“But sometimes. . . . it’s simply not the kind of book a legacy publisher would be interested in. The pacing doesn’t match that of titles currently doing well in the marketplace. There might be too much description, or the plot moves in odd directions. . . .

“If an editor did work on a book like this, they’d probably cut a lot of what some might consider unnecessary description, subplots, and backstory. They’d rearrange the plot elements into a more linear narrative, with more forward drive.

“Which makes me glad there’s now a ready outlet for authors with a more idiosyncratic way of telling a story.”

So there you have it, my friends. Do you think legacy publishing is going to disappear and that small presses will take over the business? What about ebooks? The latest statistic in Publisher’s Weekly is that ebook sales growth is down, but I don’t know how that compares to print sales. And we’re still talking about a three hundred million dollar market for ebooks.

A DIGEST Edition of May-JuneMagazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is FREE on Amazon.com for readers with Kindles or Kindle Apps. This is NOT the full version of the magazine but it does contain my story “Teardrop.” You can also sign up to receive a monthly Digest edition—or not. Your choice! The Digest Edition is only available until June 15, so download yours today! http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004ZFZCKY/

We’ve got a wonderful little public library that’s a pleasant leafy walk away from home. Tom goes there nearly every week to borrow new magazines and books. We pay a lot of taxes to the city so, in a fair civic exchange, we save a bit of money in the cost of magazine subscriptions.

My mother always had a lot of magazines around and I learned to read with them. I love magazines to this day and regularly look over science magazines for research and ideas.

If the new issue is there, Tom will check out for me a writer’s magazine aimed squarely at aspiring writers. Ads for writers’ conventions, editors-for-hire, contests with entry fees, and other gimmicks to pick the unwary author’s pocket abound. But I glance the articles over in case I find any useful information and sometimes I do.

An article about “Partnership Publishing” from a recent issue caught my attention and I want to alert you, too. The article was written by a “literary agent” who “guides” aspiring authors into what I can only call yet another scam. One wonders who pays the agent’s commission—the unwary author who retains her or the “partnership publishers” she lines them up with. Maybe both.

Here’s how her spin starts out (and I quote):

“Authors embracing partnership publishing….are often tired of the hoops they have to jump through for the implied ‘stamp of legitimacy’ conferred by the traditional publishing industry.”

Okay, so are independent authors tired of the hoops. But independent authors can publish their books virtually for free if they’re willing to invest a little time in researching format, editing and proofing their own work, and learning how to put together a nice cover. None of those tasks are impossible or expensive.

The article goes on with the sales pitch: “Partnership publishers are modeled on traditional presses….Partnership presses typically publish their books in both print and e-formats and the traditional print distribution they offer is a big selling point as the self-pub world turns ever more digital.”

Hmm. Well, you as an independent author can also publish your book in print and ebook formats. But it’s quite true, independents still can’t compete with traditional publishers and traditional print distribution. This, as I’ve noted before in this blog, is the major hurdle for independent publishing. I haven’t seen it surmounted by anyone or any publisher yet other than a Big Five imprint.

Now the article tosses a sweetener into the mix: “While many review outlets are still trying to figure out how to classify partnership books, as of July 2014 Publishers Weekly began allowing partnership and other “hybrid” publishers to submit for reviews.”

Well, yes. Publishers Weekly also allows independently published books to be submitted for reviews—for $175 per six months. An established review venue like Book List will take your book for review—for a couple thousand bucks, including an ad. And on it goes. Everybody’s out to offer authors traditional services–for a price. It’s disgusting. And for the record, I haven’t seen any books published by partnership publishers on any bestseller list nor have I heard of any of these publishers prior to reading this article.

And now for clincher (I quote from the article again):

“Authors bear not only the cost of editing and production, but marketing and publicity…Partnership publishing is curated with a focus on quality and marketability. Partnership publishers—often staffed by seasoned book professionals, including acquisition editors and knowledgeable publishers at the helm—vet submissions just as traditional publishers do, culling those they feel have the greatest potential.”

Wait, wait. You have to pay to jump through those tired old hoops imposed by traditional publishers? And who are these acquisition editors? If they’re seasoned book professionals, why are they working for a scam like this instead of for a legitimate publisher?

And now for the sticker price:

“For some authors, the cost of partnership publishing can seem prohibitive…Authors who’ve selected pay-to-publish models have found it to be a $ 5,000–$ 10,000 investment, not including printing costs.”

Let me get this straight: one of these publishers is going to turn down an author willing and able to pony up ten grand to be “selected”? Are you kidding me?

So there you have it, my friends. If you simply want to write your memoirs and send copies to your family and friends, you can easily do that with some research into formatting and cover creation and do it yourself for free or a minimal cost. If you’ve got a compelling story to tell and want to present that to the world but feel you need help with editing, proofreading, and cover creation, you need only google people who will do any of those tasks for a price and, after researching them, hire someone yourself. You don’t need a middleman for that!

And if you want to become a professional writer, you need to educate yourself, read extensively, work hard, take your work out to professional markets, and take your chances.

As I’ve written in this blog many, many times, being a writer isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme!

I picked up this speech from Publisher’s Weekly after receiving Mark Coker’s Smashwords blog distributed to authors, which puts a considerably gloomier spin on publishing in 2015. I’m quoting this verbatim with my comments interjected here and there:

PW: “Self-publishing isn’t going anywhere, and Smashwords’ Mark Coker recently took a look at how we got here.”

LM Comment: An unfortunate choice of words. I thought PW was going to say ‘Self-publishing is dying.’ What they meant to say is, ‘Self-publishing is here to stay.’

PW: “The Self-Publishing Book Expo was held in New York City recently with Coker giving the keynote address. Several trends have led to the explosion of self-publishing, and many of those reasons have allowed Smashwords to grow into a leading distributor of e-books.

Here were Coker’s 10 trends in the self-publishing marketplace:

Coker: 1. Rise of ebooks
When Smashwords was incorporated in 2007, e-books accounted for one-half of one percent of the market, according to Coker. Amazon brought a lot of attention to the ebook market and it starting growing exponentially, Coker said.

“Today around 35 percent measured in dollar terms of the overall publishing market goes to ebooks and for some genres it’s even higher,” Coker said. “Print is not dead though. The growth of e-books has slowed. I think e-books will continue to grow of books purchased and read but at a much lower rate.”

LM Comment: ‘Measured in dollar terms.’ This means independent authors claim much higher percentage of revenues per title than traditional authors, which is quite true. As a percentage share of total books sold, however, ebooks remain at about ten percent of the total book market. I’ve noted that independent authors who also invest in print books (and it’s an out-of-pocket expense) sell about ten times more ebooks than of their print books. For traditional authors, this percentage skews just the other way, ten times more print books than ebooks. Why? Because independent print books still can’t begin to compete with the big distribution channels of traditional publishers.

Coker: “2. Trends in publishing tools
“The printing press is free and available to you, the knowledge is free and available to you,” Coker said “You have the knowledge and tools to publish like a professional and writers are taking advantages of these tools. It allows writers to go faster to market.”

LM Comment: Publishing ebooks is free with knowledge about formatting and such. But that’s not the same thing as ‘printing press,’ which implies print books and is not free at all.

Coker: “3. Self-publishing authors hitting best sellers lists
Self-published authors appear on every major ebook retailer’s best-sellers list, along with USA Today and the New York Times lists. Coker predicts this will only become the norm.

“By year 2020, 50 percent of the ebook market will be controlled by indie authors.”

LM Comment: But if expansion of the ebook market is slowing and the glut of free or 99 cent content is bloating, ‘50 percent of the ebook market’ is a misleading statistic. If the ebook market remains only ten percent of the total book market, that’s 50 percent of not very much.

Coker: “4. Stigma of self-publishing disappearing
“Six years ago, self-publishing was viewed as an option of last resort, it was viewed as a place for failed writers,” Coker said. “(Indie authors) realize now their books can be as a good or better than what is published by New York.”

With that, however, Coker notes the stigma of traditional publishing increases with much of it being self-inflicted. Examples include traditional publishers pricing ebooks too high, not publishing fast enough and aren’t giving authors enough control.

LM Comment: This is an interesting twist often employed by propagandists—to conflate or equate a single term in two different contexts without noting the difference. Confusing? I think so. He was talking about the “stigma” of indies, then switches to the “stigma” of traditionals. Traditional publishing has no stigma. The business is riddled with serious problems but I doubt anyone would say traditional publishing has a stigma.

“This acquisition confirmed the worst fear of many authors that their publishers don’t care about them,” Coker said. “I know that’s not true. I met so many people in the publishing industry. Publishers do care about authors, they care about people but this was a big mistake that they made, getting into vanity publishing.

“It was a mistake for a publisher to take money from a writer; they should never take money from a writer. The money should flow from readers to publishers to writers and not the other way around.”

LM Comment: Amen to this. In the next blog, I’ll tell you about what I’ve learned about “Partnership Publishing.” But here’s the first warning flag—if anyone approaches you as an author to engage in “partnership publishing,” check your handbag and pockets to make sure you’ve still got your wallet and run away. Fast.

LM Comment: My Smashwords titles have done well at Oyster and Scribd. But then, in July 2014, along came Amazon.com with Kindle Unlimited, a subscription service that offers readers free books, and purports to pay authors a percentage from a “fund” for every free borrow. Please see the previous blog in this series for my description of the serious detriment to authors resulting from KU.

“It looks like Hachette prevailed with the ability to control ebooks, but this dispute revealed a lot of ugliness in the industry,” Coker said. “It created a lot of division. We saw authors attacking authors with people who took sides. It was unfortunate it devolved into that, but the dispute gave many publishers insight into Amazon’s strategy.”

Coker notes that Amazon is in the business of controlling its suppliers. Amazon views books as commodities and puts “the squeeze” on suppliers so they can offer consumers lower prices.

“Publishers don’t like being treated they are selling a commodity. This isn’t a product that could be outsourced to China,” Coker said. “This is a product that is created by writers like yourselves.”

Amazon will also put a large emphasis on its own books under its publishing umbrella.

“They have the right to decide what books they are going promote and what they have shown is that they are going to give a merchandising and discovery advantage to books that are published under Amazon and nowhere else,” Coker said. “Exclusivity is going to be core for them going forward.”

LM Comment: One of the most serious problems with traditional publishing is that they DO treat books like widgets. If a book doesn’t sell what they feel is an adequate number in a short period of time, the book is yanked out of print, and the author can’t do a thing about it. So while it’s quite true no business can outsource books, especially fiction, to China, the notion that traditional publishers aren’t treating books as a commodity is laughable. That’s why the independent publishing revolution arose in the first place, driven by many traditional authors like yours truly whose books were not treated well by traditional publishers.

Coker: “8. E-books going global
Last year, 45 percent of sales through Apple iBooks came from outside of the U.S. (on Smashwords).

LM Comment: Hooray for worldwide readers! But the huge question remains, how does an author become visible in media blizzard?

Coker: “9. Self-publishing leading to a tsunami of low quality books, but they are invisible
“Readers don’t respond to poor quality books,” Coker said. “The flip side is that it’s leading to tsunami of high quality books and enables more high quality books to be published like never before. That’s why self-publishing is so great, by allowing everything to be published, amazing works of brilliance are allowed to be published.”

LM Comment: Sadly, no they’re not invisible. They’re everywhere.

Coker: “10. For authors, everything gets tougher from here on out
“Like cobwebs of stainless steel, ebooks are immortal,” Coker said. “They will always be on the shelf. They will never be out of print. This is both good and bad. Self-published means you can earn you annuities for the rest of your life, but also means more competition, and the competition is going to get fiercer and fiercer every single year.”

Coker notes that supply of books will likely surpass the amount of people available to read them all. Therefore, it will make the road a bit more difficult even for those seeking the traditional route.

However, Coker’s own story about having to borrow money to keep Smashwords afloat in the beginning led to his last point to the authors at the Self-Publishing Book Expo.

“This is not the time to quit. This is the time to start,” he said. “Even though the future is challenging, there has never been a better time to publish. You now have access to a global market of millions of readers who are looking to discover the very best books.”

So there you have it, my friends. Coker’s speech to an independent publishing convention was quite different from the 2015 predictions blog he sent to Smashwords authors and the last point of the speech is the gist of the State of the Biz in 2015. Times are tough, there’s a hustler born every minute, and packagers and marketers and middlepersons and gatekeepers are scheming like mad how to get the talent’s money.

To me, this statement of Coker’s is the most salient: “It’s a mistake for a publisher to take money from a writer; they should never take money from a writer. The money should flow from readers to publishers to writers and not the other way around.”

In the next few blogs in this series, I’ll tell you what I’ve learned about “partnership publishing” and about true “hybrid publishing.”

In October, 2013 I started a series of conversations with my acquaintance, the author Elle Emerson. I don’t have the link handy, but if you scroll back on WordPress to October 19, 2013, you’ll find our first conversation, which I entitled “Tales of Woe.”

Twenty years ago, Ms. Emerson began publishing stories in professional magazines and then books with two of the Big Five Publishers. She got good reviews, award nominations, and even a New York Times Notable Book designation.

But she didn’t get enough of a readership in a short enough timeframe and the Big Publishers crushed her career.

She knows a lot and has experienced a lot and I wanted to interview her and set out our conversations here.

I’ve been after her for months to tell me more. I regret to tell you she just called me and has declined to proceed further.

When I asked her why, she said, “Plenty of authors are writing about the problems with traditional publishing. The New York Times recently ran an article by a successful author who explained why she’s self-publishing her new book. Another author has written extensively in her blog about her problems. I don’t want to go there. However legitimate, these types of confessions sound like complaining. And I don’t see how it does anyone any good. If you’re traditionally published, you already know the score. If you’re not, you’ll probably never have to deal with it.” She laughed. “You’ll have to deal with self-publishing.”

“Okay,” she said. “An editor who is no longer in publishing at all went off on his vacation to Italy after neglecting to include my Author’s Bio in the first edition of what was my biggest book. The book had to launch without it. This same editor withheld the payment of an advance after I had turned in my book. The editor had approved the book and was required under contract to pay me. But he stalled anyway as sort of a passive=aggressive power move even though my husband had just had surgery and we really needed the money. I had to get down on my hands and knees and beg for money I was legally and promptly owed.”

Wow. I was starting to get the picture. I should add, Ms. Emerson is an attractive, positive, cooperative, brilliant, business-savvy woman, as well as being talented and dedicated.

I was intrigued by her last words in our October interview. She had said: “I’ve been abused for years by the publishing business. The publishing business is just like a toxic parent.” What did she mean by that?

“If you’re a child with a toxic parent, you are totally dominated by that parent,” she said. “The parent controls your time, your activities, and your means of support. S/he demands that you meet every requirement the parent sets out, demands you abide by the parent’s rules, demands your loyalty and your love. In return, the parent doesn’t have to do anything. The parent can be cruel, withholding, manipulative, and careless, and you the child can’t do anything about it.”

“So traditional publishing is like that?” I said. I must tell you, she was making me nervous.

“You got it,” she said.

“What about independent publishing?” I wanted her opinion on this.

“It’s a time-consuming and expensive hobby that may or may not enable you to make a tiny living,” she said with a laugh. “I think there’s a lot of luck involved along with the hard work.”

So there you have it, my friends. “I have to get on with my life,” Ms. Emerson told me and ended the call. So do we all. I thanked her and said goodbye.

Seriously, if you have the time and inclination to follow this latest crisis in publishing, you only need to Google the title above to find ten thousand opinions and renditions of it.

One of the most absurd developments is multi-billion-dollar corporations soliciting the support of the people typically lowest and most powerless on their totem power—the Authors.

“What?” you say. “Aren’t writers the source of the content for both these corporations? Without authors, would they have any business to run?”

That’s right. But unless you as an author become like Stephenie Meyer or Suzanne Collins, you are one of thousands to a traditional publisher. Meaning, as I’ve detailed in this Blog Series and in the Crunching the Numbers Blog Series, They Don’t Care.

And Amazon? Amazon—and Smashwords, less so Barnes and Noble—has always been pro-author, especially independent authors. I, among many, am grateful for the opportunity to revitalize my backlist, find new readers, and even develop new projects without the interference of literary agents and editors.

One positive development in the dispute? Sensitive to the charge that Amazon offers “pre-orders” to traditional publishers but not to independent publishers, Amazon has just this week introduced a “pre-order” functionality for independent publishers and authors. (That’s another topic. Smashwords offers pre-orders, too. I haven’t had a new title since the strategy became available, so I don’t have experience with it yet. When I do, I’ll let you know how it works and whether it works.)

If Amazon engages in business practices that Hatchett and its authors disapprove of, we can all come to our judgment about that. I personally have no business with Hatchett at the moment.

One issue that Amazon has pursued in the litigation is that Hatchett charges too much for its e-books. Amazon has sounded a call for lower ebook prices from traditional publishers.

I strenuously object. That independent publishers and authors can offer ebooks at prices much lower than traditional publishers is our one main competitive advantage. I can offer you a quality acclaimed work like Summer of Love for $ 7.99 instead of $ 14.99. I applaud Hatchett charging $ 14.99 and up for its ebooks. Go for it.

I’ve been personally solicited to sign petitions by both corporations and have declined to participate in either.

So there you have it, my friends. What authors have to say will mostly likely amount to little, if nothing. Stay informed, but don’t lose any sleep over this dispute.

“Bowker released its estimates of print book production for 2013, noting that what they call “traditional” output–which includes self-publishers like CreateSpace, but excludes public domain POD factories like BiblioBazaar — dipped 2 percent from 309,957 titles in 2012 to a projected 304,912 titles in 2013. Despite the decline as compared to the previous year (and general growth in the several years before then) Bowker said the result “points to a relatively stable market for print works despite competition from e-books.”

The public domain business (or what Bowker refers to as “nontraditional” titles) declined far more significantly, to 1,108,183 titles, a decrease of 46 percent from its production of 2,042,840 titles in 2012. It’s important to remember, as we have reminded in the past, that Bowker’s official stats continue to measure only books issued in print form (including print on demand). They still do not tabulate counts for ebooks issued during the year, so the numbers clearly under-represent the actual amount of new volumes coming to market.

Among “traditional” titles, fiction remains the largest single category with 50,000 titles, a slight increase from the previous year, with the broad listing of juveniles second at 33,000 titles, followed by sociology/economics at 29,300 titles.”

What does that mean for you and me?

It’s pretty dire. If you’re a traditionally published author, expect advances, print runs, and publishers’ commitment to you to decline. Get ready to have your series discontinued. I’m sorry to say it, but that’s the way publishing (or any business) is. When sales decline, expenses are cut.

If you’re an independently published author and considering financing a print-on-demand print book, think again. If you don’t know HTML, you’ll have to hire someone who does. If you use CreateSpace, the only place you’ll be able to distribute your books is on Amazon.com, which owns CreateSpace. Not other on-line retailer will list your book (hint: they hate Amazon.com). If you actually do a print run, most independent bookstores won’t stock your book.

As I cautioned you in State of the Biz: Publishing in 2014 and Beyond, Part 6: Ebooks Versus Print Books, print books are a very risky business for you.